South Africa Diaries

It seems that a lot of readers are not aware (probably because I haven’t publicised it very well!) that I wrote a monthly column in Expat Focus entitled South Africa Diaries.

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The Diaries trace my journey starting in 1990, when I first started taking three month trips to Durban to work with scratch card lotteries in the Transkei and Johannesburg, right through until I left Cape Town for Thailand in 2011.

Unfortunately I cannot reblog the posts but you can read them by going to the ‘Read my columns’ page ‘Expat Focus’ at the top of this blog.

0 thoughts on “South Africa Diaries”

Thanks Svetlana. They were taken with my old Canon Powershot 5mp (shot in JPEG) years ago and long before I had any idea about photography. I just reworked them in Lightroom and Topaz so they look a lot better than the originals. I am now working on pre-digital scanned in prints from Trinidad Carnival circa 1983 for a post I am planning. Should be fun. Keep well. James

Thanks Svetlana. They were taken with my old Canon Powershot 5mp (shot in JPEG) years ago and long before I had any idea about photography. I just reworked them in Lightroom and Topaz so they look a lot better than the originals. I am now working on pre-digital scanned in prints from Trinidad Carnival circa 1983 for a post I am planning. Should be fun. Keep well. James

Hi, I’m James King, an Englishman who emigrated to South Africa in 1995. I was lucky that my work took me all over the Country, where I visited Cities, townships and rural areas, learning about the culture and lives of the people, after apartheid.

I moved to Thailand in 2011 where I live in semi-retirement. I created a blog in 2013, wrote books and learned the craft of landscape photography. All have been hobbies and great fun.

My life has been somewhat fractured and rather unconventional. Looking back I’m amazed at the varied people I’ve met. Politicians, sports stars, music impresarios, business tycoons, murderers, fraudsters, creatives of all sorts and even hired assassins. They have unwittingly provided rare material which has helped me so much in my writing.

After cutting my teeth on blogging, writing non-fiction travel books about Thailand and poetry I discovered a fascination for suspense drama. I started working on a story with a literary bent and character-driven suspense with twists, thrills and emotion. It has since developed into a fiction series and the first book in the series is due to be published early in 2018.

Writing poetry is wonderfully relaxing. I find myself drifting from the romantic to fear for the survival of our broken world to human rights and the darkness of death. Music, film, and literature have been a great inspiration. Shakespeare, Dickens, Hesse, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, among others, have all had a profound influence on my life at some point and ultimately find their way into my writing as I try to deliver my message.

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